The Distant Ruins of the Distant County (5)
I wondered if an ogre had wandered nearby. Uneasy, I cast my detection magic once more, but neither ogre nor carriage appeared. All I could sense was something like a tiny lifeform.
Strange…
That shouldn’t have been possible. I had specifically tuned the spell’s threshold so that minuscule lifeforms wouldn’t register. If it picked up every insect’s mana, the flood of signals would render the spell useless. Neither Viran nor I were fools; we had calibrated it to register signals no smaller than a goblin at minimum.
It’s close, though…
I swept my gaze across the circular enclosure. The grass that had once sprouted here had all withered and blown away on the ceaseless prairie wind, leaving only a thin layer of dust that swirled like powder across the ground.
Oddly enough, I don’t feel afraid or anxious. It’s a strange sensation, as if something is gently soothing my unease…
Whatever it was, it clearly posed no threat. I let my attention drift from the faint thread of mana and turned instead to the mirror.
It was a round, concave mirror made of metal. The surface formed an almost perfect smooth parabolic curve. Though slightly dented and scratched, it retained enough of its original shape to still function as a mirror. At its center was a perfectly circular hole. Despite being metal, it showed no trace of rust. What kind of alloy was this?
Suddenly sensing something, I lightly touched the mirror.
…There’s mana in it.
It wasn’t strong enough to cast spells immediately after being drawn, nor did it seem designed for that purpose. It appeared to be a simple preservation enchantment meant to protect its circular form and surface. Still, for mana to endure thousands of years like this—unless someone had deliberately discarded it here—it was remarkable.
I had never seen such an instrument in the Empire. If the goal was simply to reflect a face, they would have ground precious metals into flat mirrors or applied thin metal foil behind glass. Producing such a flawless curved surface would have been questionable at best.
If it wasn’t crafted by dwarven machinery… could the elves from thousands of years ago have made it themselves?
Whichever the case, I still had no answer for why such a concave metal plate would be abandoned in these desolate ruins. Had I come all this way to a gloomy relic only to leave with an unsolvable riddle after clearing away a bit of overgrowth?
That was when something caught the morning light and glittered. It wasn’t in the same spot as the large concave mirror I had seen earlier.
This is…
I walked over, the soft crunch of my footsteps echoing, then knelt on one knee in the dirt. It was another mirror. Like the first, it was slightly dented and scratched, but otherwise clearly recognizable as a mirror. Unlike the body-sized concave one, this smaller mirror was convex.
I picked up the small round mirror and lifted it to eye level. Sunlight streamed through the curved surface. Suddenly, something I had grown sick of seeing back on Earth came to mind. Two circular mirrors—one concave, one convex—with a hole in the larger one…
A reflecting telescope…? And a Cassegrain design at that? No way.
I carefully set the small mirror back where I had found it. I had never heard of anything like a reflecting telescope existing in this world. At the Magic Academy, they had introduced refractive telescopes with lenses as “cutting-edge toys,” and I had solved optical geometry problems I remembered from Earth as practice for magical theory, but this…
If this truly was a telescope, judging by the size of the primary mirror, its aperture would have been measured in meters. Even in the modern era, something like that would be an astronomically expensive instrument. Could this place have been an ancient elven observatory?
Had a dome once covered this circular building? But if they possessed such technology, they should have been building airplanes or launching rockets into space by now. Why were they still holed up in that floating city above the desert, never coming out?
…Still, I should record the image of these mirrors with transcription magic. I’ll have to write to Master Viran someday. Maybe borrow her name and ask her to publish a short paper on these mirrors in a magical journal.
It was fascinating enough on its own, but it was time to move on. This was sufficient. By taking one more step toward being known as the harmless mage and researcher Kaira instead of the Witch of Sand, I had gained all I needed here.
Time to head north again. Before I ran into an ogre and made things complicated. With that thought, I set the mirror down—and that was when I noticed something on the ground.
A hole…?
It was a perfectly circular stone lid. It resembled the stone manholes I had seen on Earth, but without any drainage perforations. There were no holes, but one side had a recessed groove. When I slipped my fingers into it, they settled comfortably.
A handle, then. Amazing that such a fine detail survived intact. Just how advanced was the stonework of the desert elves…?
As I steadied my mana circulation, I felt something leaking out. A thin thread of mana—delicate as silk, yet woven so tightly it would not break. I sensed no hostility. Instead, it carried a strange mana that sparked curiosity and a thirst for discovery.
So that’s what the detection spell picked up earlier. More precisely… something inside this. The stone lid must have dampened the signal, making it seem small.
I stared at the lid with its handle for a long time.
A handle, huh…
…
I suppose… I have to open it, don’t I?
There couldn’t possibly be nothing inside. Whether it was a small storage room packed with dust-covered crates or an ancient research facility teeming with monsters, if they had designed a lid meant to be opened and entered, something had to be down there.
Given the telescope, it might simply be a place where they analyzed celestial observation equipment. Perhaps a spectroscope, or even some kind of mana-powered computer. It might not have held any tremendous value from the start, and now only decayed ruins remained, everything rotted away and useless.
But none of that mattered. Even if it was just a sewer, it didn’t matter. Not opening it would be rude. It would be the height of discourtesy toward the ancients who had created this.
Yes. This was simply a matter of showing respect to the ancient elves who had built such a sturdy lid capable of enduring thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of years.
Even if the ogres scolded me for it later, I couldn’t back down now.
…After finishing that string of rationalizations in my head, I pulled on the lid with all my strength.
“Nngh……”
……?
“Ugh… hnnng… Hnnnggggggggh!!!!”
…….
I collapsed on the spot with a thud, groaning.
“It’s heavy……”
I had used every ounce of strength I possessed, but the lid had only given the slightest tremble. Not even a crack had appeared. It might even be heavier than my entire body.
I gave up cleanly. Learning a bit of swordsmanship hadn’t exactly bulked me up. And even the muscle I might have gained had been erased when I rewound time to rid myself of menstrual cramps.
Instead, I opened Viran’s book. There had been a strange spell—telekinesis—that consumed mana in proportion to size rather than weight. I had always wondered why it was designed that way instead of by mass, but now I understood. It was for moments like this. As long as the object within sight had no will to resist, the spell could move it with ease.
I flipped through the pages, then tore a sheet from my memo spellbook to run some quick calculations. Since I had only remembered its existence and had never cast it before, mental arithmetic was out of the question.
Once I had fully prepared the spell and looked back at the lid—
“Huh…?”
The lid was already neatly open.
What in the world…?
Had some automatic opening enchantment activated late? The open hole seemed to beckon me, and though it felt slightly suspicious, a strange intuition told me I didn’t need to worry about that suspicion. A gut feeling that it wasn’t dangerous, so I might as well go inside.
More pressingly, a compulsion to test the spell I had gone to such lengths to prepare tightened around my mind. I focused Viran’s telekinesis—now unnecessary—on the heavy stone lid that had already opened itself.
“Whoa……”
The air around the lid seemed to refract slightly, warping the image, and then the lid lifted with a low groan. Something I clearly couldn’t have budged with my own strength rose so easily. Since I had it up, I decided to test whether it would move freely as well.
Left. Right… right, up, left… forward, down, forward, A. Rising Dragon Fist command.
…The lid followed every movement I imagined. Even the Rising Dragon Fist. The way it obeyed my thoughts was almost cute. Maybe I could fling nearby stones with it in a fight.
A heavy clunk echoed across the ground as I set the lid down. A pitch-black hole gaped open. I swallowed dryly and cautiously tossed a sphere of magical light into the opening.
The softly illuminated interior revealed what looked like a corridor. It was impeccably clean, as though time had passed it by entirely. Could a single circular stone lid really have preserved it so well? Or had a preservation spell been cast on it, like the one on the mirrors?
A breeze rose gently from inside the passage, lightly lifting my bangs.
My heart’s pounding.
Along with the wind blowing from within came an irresistible surge of curiosity.
It was time to explore the underground of an ancient ruin that had remained secret for thousands of years.